Sitting in the front row of the Playhouse Theatre, Hobart, on Saturday evening, I watched the actors for Under Milkwood – all fourteen of them – make their way onto the stage. They drifted in casually, in twos and threes, taking their places on the levelled steps around the edge of the set. Unlike most productions that employee the fourth wall, there was no customary “entering the world of the fiction” ritual, which usually takes place in a theatre. Most shows employ a small piece of ceremony to signify this shift. Usually the music becomes silent, lights are cut and the audience quietens. Then, there is a moment of collective silence and anticipation before lights are raised and we enter a new world, together. Under Milkwood, such ceremony was absent. The actors sat, the audience gradually quietened – and the story began.
Usually, the collective transportation to a new reality is instant. It’s collective because we all experience the same shift across the threshold. The music quietens for everyone. We collectively become silent, a deep inhale before the shift. The room becomes dark – a space of possibility. In that moment, we mutually agree to play together. I like to think of it as both an energetic “plugging in” to a collective field of consciousness – and a “letting go” of this reality. We release our grip on this reality together, trusting the story to catch us.
This absence of the usual ritual created a different flavour of experience for me. The first few minutes of the play, hearing the beautiful prose of Dylan Thomas’ words, I didn’t see a farmer, or a priest, or a publican. I saw people I knew. The teacher aid I’d worked with years previously, and a memory of a conversation involving a conspiracy theory and a local business owner. An actor who didn’t use his real name on Facebook – but a nickname, that everyone also called him in real-life. I didn’t see the Welsh village of Llareggub. I saw the Playhouse stage where I took after-school improvisation classes in grade seven, and the pair of royal blue shoes with silver zips I wore there.
Then, slowly, over minutes, the image of the story began to seep through the actors and the stage. I use these words deliberately. “Seep through” because it felt as though every person on that stage was being filled with the story – the same way a dry sponge can be slowly filled with water, when held under a small stream. “The image”, because the story arrived fully formed. Under Milkwood has been told so many times that it has a strong morphic field. It didn’t come in pieces: it came as a block of thought, real-ised by the actors into physical reality.
It was fascinating to watch the shift in real-time. Usually, it happens in that moment where the lights are off, as the audience collectively hold our breath. This show’s choice to not employ the usual ritual meant the process happened in front of us, in the light, stretched across slow motion. What usually is instant, I saw unfold. I watched as the actors became the characters and the stage became the village. I watched the space fill up with the story.
Centuries ago, Ancient Greek religions saw their gods and goddesses as beings who could inhabit humans. A priest would put on the mask of a god and participate in a ritual, acting as an intermediary for the god to “come through” and be present with mortals. Some gods were named for forces, such as Eros (sexual desire), Aphrodite (love) or Ares (war). These could “fill up” a worshipper, turning them into an agent of that being. The act of putting on the mask was a ritual, symbolising that the divine was now present. In a similar way, the act of dimming the lights is a ritual, symbolising that we are entering a different world. In one, the divine becomes present in this world. In the other, we collectively travel somewhere else. Both are rituals for the opening of transit between realities.
Being aware of the field as a field of consciousness realised into physical attuned me to other versions of this production. I saw flashes of other theatres, other casts, other cities where this had been staged. Not necessarily “accurate” vision, but a visual interpretation of energetic imprints. The awareness contained within it a sense that every time this show had been staged, it became easier for the actors to learn the lines and be inspired to movement and voice.
However, this contained a risk that defied new ways of thinking: in work that is well-performed, lines of thought develop like train-tracks. It becomes more difficult to “think against” them, to be inspired differently. Well-thought-on stories can become massive fields of energy – just consider any religion and how natural its adherents find it to follow the established thought-ways. This tendency (probably a better word than “risk”) applies to both those staging the show and those watching it. “New” only comes from being inspired in the present. We cannot be inspired in the present if we are being informed what’s happening by every similar version of the past.
Twenty minutes into the show, I was comfortably immersed in the same field of consciousness with everyone else in the room, witnessing the Spring Day in Llareggub unfold. No longer “audience and stage”, but one tale, witnessed from multiple vantage-points. We were carried on a stream of story, but not only by this staging and these actors. We were carried by the fact that every iteration of the piece was in some way present every time this story is performed. In this instance, it wasn’t a problem. The village was pleasant. The inhabitants charming, humorous and relatable. All so human. All so informed by the field of “what it is to be human”. Every person in the audience could relate to the story in some way. It was pleasurable to be safe in our seats, seeing ourselves played out on stage.
It was probably a similar, charming pleasure that most every audience has felt, ever, while experiencing that show.